What better way to celebrate the new year than to post a link to a summary of my blog statistics! Sounds boring, right? But I find these year-end summaries quite fascinating, and I love seeing what has been going on behind the scenes at my favorite bloggers’ sites. I hope you enjoy looking at mine!

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 74,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

In fact, I find these summaries and data visualizations so fascinating that I conducted a study last semester with a colleague on how site owners use this sort of data. We focused specifically on Google Analytics as a platform, and we found that most site owners play with the data but have no clear plan for using it to improve site performance. We also found that such data can be overwhelming. There’s so much of it. And while the participants we talked with used Google Analytics, almost all of them supplemented that data with another platform as well, including WordPress Statistics. Because this information is so readily available to all of us who post content to the internet, it will be fascinating to see how we eventually learn to utilize it more effectively.

How do you use your statistics?

Lastly, I want to give a shout-out to all of my loyal blog followers, especially those who commented so frequently and astutely. You can see this if you clicked over to the full report, but just in case you didn’t, here’s a screenshot of my top five commenters.

Thanks to these lovely bloggers and blog readers. You make it worth my time! I am lucky to interact with all of you. Happy New Year!

I don’t! 🙂 I used to check them so many times a day just for fun. It feels validating to get numbers, and I always wanted to beat my highest views. My best advice, if you want higher stats, is to post consistently (two or three times a week) to increase your chances of being viewed and your chances of Freshly Pressed. (Maybe you already do this. Just keep at it.) That is what really helped my blog take off with numbers.

Thanks. Have posts scheduled about every 2 days, and I have also got New Years resolutions including taking part in memes, taking part in other people’s posts etc (why should people read mine, if I dont read theirs?!)

Happy New Year Emily! I really love your blog. I don’t have a lot of people I can talk about books with and I love your insights. I think it is wonderful that you keep it up even though you have such a busy life with your family, work and studies.

Thanks so much, Caitlin! I love have you here and reading and making comments. I think I keep going because I know that I get to interact with such great people like you. Thanks for making it all worth it.

I’m really so happy that I found your blog this year and that we ended up chatting and finding weird things in common and blogging together on Literary Wives. You have a wonderful blog and I was inspired in large part by your blog to start writing about books myself. I’m looking forward to reading more from you in the year ahead!

Thanks, Cecilia! I love your blog! In fact, I have a post of yours about mothers and daughters sitting in my inbox that I want to give my full attention to when I read it, so I’ll get to it soon. My ipad broke and is being repaired, which means I have to trek into my basement for a computer. Such a hardship! 😉 I’m glad we are friends!

Aw, thanks, Emily! Gosh, I feel very embarrassed about my mother-daughter post…mainly because it is so personal and I feel naked having written it. The blog host is a wonderful woman whom I’ve become friends with over the last year, just through our writing, and she asked me if I could contribute a post to her mother-daughter series. It was the most painful and difficult thing I had ever written. Anyway, thanks for putting that on your to-read list.